Heh, I am a little worried about the cooling guys - I have a couple of huge CPU coolers, but I am prepared to go to water cooling if I have to - thing is this PC needs to work in a hottish room as you will have seen from my studio blog, so I am half expectng overheating and stability issues ...

I'm going to try very hard to make Vista work - you don't know until you try! I can always fall back to XP if absolutely necessary though ....

Nice Andrew. I admire you for taking on the build up yourself. Just upgraded myself to an XPS 420 with Intel Core 2 Q6600, a 2.4GHz quad-core, 4g of ram. With the ATI Radeon HD 2400 graphics card, the 3d images are amazing.

I would keep that chasis as open as possible with all you got in there.

I am thinking of upgrading my computer or just buying a new one very soon. Please let me know how yours will do with video and audio editing at the same time. A lot of people suggest avoiding Vista but don't take my word for it I never tried it

Ive been running vista...32bit and 64bit on different machines, and with their more recent updates like service pack 1 I have had 0 issues. Don't hate on vista to much, it definitely has some good things going for it. I personally have never had any issue with recording DAW's or driver support for ASIO or anything like that, and I've used quite a few different DAW's trying to figure out which i like best.

And may I ask why the 8 core machine Andrew? My quad and render out a very layered project song in under a minute. I also do video editing and have rendered a highly compressed 30min. long video that i made in about 35-40min. which is pretty good considering the format I was using. Just seems like a kinda overkill processor setup. I am however highly jealous of your dual Raid setup

Hey Andrew, sounds like a great system. My only two concerns would be 1) vista compatibility with software you want to use 2) mainly 64 bit compatibility with software you want to use, 64 bit has not garnered the support that one would expect leaving many early adopters in a bind. My main suggestion would be determine which music software/video software/ and other apps/games you want to use in advance and check system requirements to ensure that they 64 bit patches or versions

Heh, I am a little worried about the cooling guys - I have a couple of huge CPU coolers, but I am prepared to go to water cooling if I have to - thing is this PC needs to work in a hottish room as you will have seen from my studio blog, so I am half expectng overheating and stability issues ...

I'm going to try very hard to make Vista work - you don't know until you try! I can always fall back to XP if absolutely necessary though ....

There really isn't anything wrong with Vista. I'm skipping Vista out however and getting the released next year Windows 7 OS which should be a lot better.

As for cooling you have a huge PC and you really need cooling on a massive level. Water Cooling I'd definitely go with.

I PROMISE you will hate Vista. I had the 64 bit Ultimate version I tried and I tried. It was unreliable, un supported, and a disaster. I highly suggest you steer away from it...

QUOTE (bmh1109 @ Sep 30 2008, 08:26 PM)

Ive been running vista...32bit and 64bit on different machines, and with their more recent updates like service pack 1 I have had 0 issues. Don't hate on vista to much, it definitely has some good things going for it. I personally have never had any issue with recording DAW's or driver support for ASIO or anything like that, and I've used quite a few different DAW's trying to figure out which i like best.

This is exactly why I am trying Vista for myself - 2 people, 2 opposite opinions! I'll just have to see how it works out for my personal usage ...

64 bit is the way to go for the future - I still might be a little ahead of the curve, but time will tell. And I still have the option of running a 32 bit OS if I really have issues.

QUOTE (bmh1109 @ Sep 30 2008, 08:26 PM)

And may I ask why the 8 core machine Andrew? My quad and render out a very layered project song in under a minute. I also do video editing and have rendered a highly compressed 30min. long video that i made in about 35-40min. which is pretty good considering the format I was using. Just seems like a kinda overkill processor setup. I am however highly jealous of your dual Raid setup

I'm sick to deat of waiting for my PC to do stuff, so I went from the sublime to the ridiculous of course (its a character flaw I know ...).

I'm pleased to hear that a Quad core would have been great for the stuff I want to do, so now I have 2 x great Also, I do a lot of 3d rendering which is even more demanding than Video & Music - I currently render 10 second video clips (not even complex ones) overnight - takes about 12 hours. I should be able to get that down to a couple of hours which would be an improvement but still nowhere near instant!

QUOTE (Duncan @ Oct 1 2008, 06:31 AM)

Water Cooling is a necessity. Also how big is the PSU?

650W - hopefully that will handle it, but if not, a PSU upgrade is cheap enough. I'll wait and see with the water, but I will start pricing options up! Any recommendations from anyone on that? I have never used WC before ...